Tuesday, November 27, 2018

A pair of researchers with the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway has found that IQ test scores have been slowly dropping over the past several decades. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg describe their study and the results they found. They also offer some possible explanations for their findings.

Prior studies have shown that people grew smarter over the first part of last century, as measured by the intelligence quotient—a trend that was dubbed the Flynn effect. Various theories have been proposed to explain this apparent brightening of the human mind, such as better nutrition, health care, education, etc, all factors that might help people grow into smarter adults than they would have otherwise. But, now, according to the researchers in Norway, that trend has ended. Instead of getting smarter, humans have started getting dumber.

The study by the team consisted of analyzing IQ test results from young men entering Norway's national service (compulsory military duty) during the years 1970 to 2009. In all, 730,000 test results were accounted for. In studying the data, the researchers found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a clear reversal of test results going back approximately 70 years.

There are other factors, of course, particularly the dysgenic effects of female education. One has to wonder what the point of educating women is supposed to be when the next generation of women are going to be considerably less intelligent because so few of the highly intelligent, highly educated manage to replace themselves.

But the sheer magnitude of the movement of peoples is the more significant factor. This is why the infrastructure in the USA is never going to return to the state it was in previous decades. The society simply isn't intelligent enough on average to maintain it any longer.

Remember, that's not just seven points, that's seven points PER GENERATION. Idiocracy is not just a movie about the dystopian future, it's a satire on the dystopian present. Welcome to Costco....

@2 "Bangkok Thailand has significantly better infrastructure than New York - yet NYC is a much higher IQ city."

Did the THAIs build that infrastructure, or did the Brits or Dutch or whoever? Were the Thais, unlike, say, africans, able to MAINTAIN the infrastructure 'bequested' to them when the colonialists/ contractors left?

The decline is palpable for anyone with a long view perspective. I'm in the generation X cohort. I've lived long enough to survey the decline.

My dad was part of the so called silent generation, a.k.a The Lucky Few. He grew up with his grandparents around in a community that likewise reached back generations and integrated them into the fold. He was another eye witness to the situation, and would tell me about the trend, as he saw it. When I was a young boy, when he'd talk about this decline, I simply thought he was being a curmudgeon about it. I was mistaken back then.

I wonder if the infrastructure in New York City being worse than Bangkok, even though maintaining a higher average IQ, could be due to the lack of a middle class in NYC. The wealth gap is incredibly large there being one of the most expensive city in the world. High IQ people likely won't be building/maintaining any infrastructure and there are very few in the middle class to do it.

Given the IQ gap between (properly) homeschooled kids and those from the public skoolz, I have to wonder how much of the drop is due to schooling standards becoming laxer and laxer over time. If the brain isn't exercised, it atrophies.

For similar reasons, I am almost certain that within the white population, the IQ drop is concentrated among leftists. The almost catastrophic decline in the quality of papers coming out of academia since the 1960s is indicative.

BTW, I remember in a Darkstream that VD had the opinion that the IQ drop is hitting whites harder than blacks, but I actually think the opposite is true. The more intelligent, more successful blacks adopt white liberal Democrat marriage and birth patterns -- for example, MLK Jr. has only one grandchild -- while the dumbest are still becoming welfare mammies. The less intelligent white conservative populations, by contrast, have birth rates no higher than better-off whites, and may in fact be lower.

In re female education: I get the impression that even there, there isn't really much of an IQ gap any more considering how college now is the equivalent of high school decades ago, and how NAMs are going to college at rates similar to whites, sucked in by affirmative action programs. Rather, young women go to college, and then into the corporate rat race, until they get married -- and unfortunately, marriage rates are plummeting, leading to more and more single women voting Marxist. It's a vicious circle.

"When I was a young boy, when he'd talk about this decline, I simply thought he was being a curmudgeon about it."

Similar dad, opposite results, oddly enough. We need all those hard-working immigrants to keep things going. He simply can't talk about immigrants without using the word hard-working. I don't believe he knows the words illegal or refugee, never heard him utter them.

Oh, and school is still about learning and education and he can't understand my son's problem with it. He had a classical education, taught by priests, and in addition to math and science and all that good stuff learned Greek and Latin. That was high school. Oh, and not one minority anywhere ever, at anytime. Never mind being a majority-minority in your own class. That certainly could never have anything to do with it.

Oh, and while talking about the hard-working immigrants, he also can't disparage fast enough those born here who aren't working as hard despite having had advantages as opposed to all those challenges facing those poor, poor immigrants who nevertheless work so hard.

We are no longer a curious culture, a culture of tinkerers. Information is given to us at the snap of our fingers. We no longer know how to dig. Everything is handed to us on a cased platter. We have truly become a virtual culture.

I normally look to incentives, habitats and such. There used to be references in ancient literature to the Greek disease or Roman disease whereby the population went up the pyramid. The wealthy and high IQ had one kid, one marriage to another similar family and the middle class became either slaves/serfs or members of the small and growing smaller elite. I think Idiocracy showed somewhat this in its excellent introduction. How many Ivy League couples have their one baby?

For our middle class-- what are the incentives to have three to four kids (or more) and what are the incentives against it? Now perform the same analysis for the multi-generational welfare queens that were seem to grow-- We get fewer producers and many many illiterate savages. The incentives used to be different and poor couples limited their kids-- tried to raise those they had to something better while the middle class had many .

Don't really know-- maybe this is just Boomer fantasy recollection-- but something certainly changed in society and I am not sure it was just mass third world immigration of another culture (although it helped).

"Diversity demands more dark skinned, low IQ, savages be raised to positions of authority to pay back all the oppression they have endured by whitey."

I watched the latest Mars landing yesterday. The interviewer on NASA's livestream was an Asian woman, there was a black woman, an hispanic man, some white women and men interviewed. Looking at the live feed told a different story. The command room had one asian man, the rest were white and at least 80% of those appeared to be male. Trying to listen to the livestream and work, it sounded like Mars landings were almost dicey. Add some diversity to the picture (like NatGeo's show from what the commercial for it seem to imply), I imagine the failures will climb along with the excuses.

If the guy who wrote the Bell Curve was right, the core within group problem is that the most rapidly reproducing group are those somewhat below average. Maybe 95 with average being 100. Because people in that category are more common in the black community, their average IQ is falling faster than for whites. Add in the tendency of the more employable blacks to leave the ghetto, and the fall in the "inner city" is going to be well above average. So far this conclusion does not conflict with common observation.

I anticipate the primary problem will be political. The less clever are more easily manipulated, and thus will be, creating a more corrupt society for everybody. Latin American politics here we come.

Did the THAIs build that infrastructure, or did the Brits or Dutch or whoever? Were the Thais, unlike, say, africans, able to MAINTAIN the infrastructure 'bequested' to them when the colonialists/ contractors left?

That infrastructure is mostly of recent construction and was build mostly by Japanese and Korean contractors. The Chinese are now building lots of infrastructure around the world, of varying quality of course. If the West becomes dumb, it is likely that more and more of our infrastructure contracting will be outsourced to mostly the Chinese. For example, I think the Oakland side of the SF-Bay bridge was built by a Chinese contractor.

Hmmm, they conclude that it has little or nothing to do with immigration:

The results show that large positive and negative trends incohort IQ operate within as well as across families. This impliesthat the trends are not due to a changing composition of families,and that there is at most a minor role for explanations involvinggenes (e.g., immigration and dysgenic fertility) and environmentalfactors largely fixed within families (e.g., parental education,socialization effects of low-ability parents, and familysize). While such factors may be present, their influence is negligiblecompared with other environmental factors. Notably, thisgoes counter to the conclusion of a recent review on retrogradeFlynn effects (6) and the expert opinions reported in a recentsurvey of intelligence researchers, which found “the anti-Flynneffect being attributed mainly to genetics and immigration”

However, they also say:

and our results remainconsistent with a number of proposed hypotheses of IQdecline: changes in educational exposure or quality, changingmedia exposure, worsening nutrition or health, and social spilloversfrom increased immigration.

> The study by the team consisted of analyzing IQ test results from young men entering Norway's national service (compulsory military duty) during the years 1970 to 2009.

Just based on this, it's entirely possible that this is pure sampling error, i.e. it might not be the nation's IQ falling, but the IQ of young men entering the military. Many countries with "compulsory" military duty have plentiful ways to evade it, higher education often being one of them. I know nothing about Norway's military duty regulations, so perhaps somebody can fill it in?

The key graph shows mean IQ rising from 99.5 up to slightly over 102, then declining back down to 99.5 before showing what appears to be the beginning of another rebound. I would like to see more data points over a longer period (and for different countries) before I consider this anything other than statistical "mud".

Anecdotally, people do appear to be getting dumber. However, I still want to see more data before I call it a trend.

In addition to "import-the-morons" contribution, I can't help being amazed by the long list of modern vices by which "more bright" people prune their own DNA branch from Humanity's Tree.

The advent of "Island of Lotus Eaters"-style electronics-derived ennui seems tailor-made to lop off the population sporting 60th-to-95th percentile intelligence. The more-stupid can't figure out the toys, and (one hopes) the very bright graduate from them out of boredom. The rest just languish on the Island until their clock runs out.

Of course, victimology's demand that resources flow in gross disproportion to the inept, the feeble, the bipolar and the permanently incapable means that any able children who lack polymath aptitude will be ignored by most school systems now. That may also contribute.

I think it's concentrating: the area we moved from was heavy diversitopia. No one expected good science fair projects. We moved to a town that had been colonized by very bright, very organized people, and the kids in high school have groups with tech patents. Tech companies put satellite offices across the street from the high school. The parents are mostly biz owners, upper management, and smart.

It seems like more than 7 points. I was watching an introductory programming course at MIT filmed in 1986. By the second week of the course they were hitting topics like recursion and first order functions that most would consider advanced now. The students, nearly all white with a few Asians, didn't grow up with computers, and at most had used something like a Commodore 64 as a teen, but they were nodding along like they were getting it. I found myself thinking, "Were we really that smart back then?"

Out of curiosity, I went to MIT's web site to see what that course would look like now. The front page had a profile of a Puerto Rican man who wants to help rebuild his home after the hurricane. Using Engineering skills, I guess. Clicking through to a second page showed more pictures of diversity, and then I gave up.

"The advent of "Island of Lotus Eaters"-style electronics-derived ennui seems tailor-made to lop off the population sporting 60th-to-95th percentile intelligence."

"Of course, victimology's demand that resources flow in gross disproportion to the inept, the feeble, the bipolar and the permanently incapable means that any able children who lack polymath aptitude will be ignored by most school systems now."

And perhaps those on the high end of the IQ scale are bored to death at school and noticed that the fruits of their future labours would primarily go to benefit the increasingly-imported left-hand of the curve types, said fuck it, I'd rather play Halo in the basement instead.

Too much confusing cause and effect when it comes to electronics, IMHO.

I think I've seen this or similar paper being already reviewed in a pre-print form on some HDB sites year ago; surely also there were earlier paper showing that there is probability of dysgenic trend in CHina (Mingrui Wang, John Fuerst, Jianjun Ren. Evidence of dysgenic fertility in China. Intelligence 57 (2016) 15-24.) and Germany (A reversal of the Flynn effect for spatial perception in German-speaking countries: Evidence from a cross-temporal IRT-based meta-analysis (1977–2014) Jakob Pietschnig and Georg Gittler. Intelligence 53 (2015) 145–153.) (Dr Thompson, now at unz.com, had a lot of those reviewed in times when he was blogging mostly on his drjamesthompson blog)

What's surprising is that they don't quote or even mention Woodley, who's already authored a motley of papers on dysgenics, mostly concentrating on slowing reaction times (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4988978/) postualting that the trends actually started at Victorian times and were only masked by better nutrition etc

We need a way to test the "give a shit" quotient. IQ might drop 7 basis points per 25yrs, but "GASQ" has dropped 50 basis points in 10 years. We need to do something about the former but the latter is incredibly destructive and negates any potential positive effects of IQ.

@25: I noticed that 'cyclic' effect where there seems to be a 2.5 point change in the average with time. We have to wait for another 20-30 years of data so by about 2025 we would have enough data to see if it is cyclic or immigration has caused a down trend.

The years they have sampled seem to fall before the advent of large-scale immigration into Norway.

There is a curious correlation with global cooling and global warming alarmism as well.

"The command room had one asian man, the rest were white and at least 80% of those appeared to be male. Trying to listen to the livestream and work, it sounded like Mars landings were almost dicey."

@19 CarpeOroFrom what I understand, Mars is harder to land on than either Earth or the Moon, because its atmosphere is too thin to be an effective brake but thick enough that it can still burn up spacecraft if they come in too quickly.

"We need a way to test the "give a shit" quotient. IQ might drop 7 basis points per 25yrs, but "GASQ" has dropped 50 basis points in 10 years. We need to do something about the former but the latter is incredibly destructive and negates any potential positive effects of IQ."

@37 AzimusI suspect the give-a-shit quotient is proportional to Christian religiosity. And the younger generations especially are filled with agnostics and atheists.

The demographic that consumes the most entertainment are the teen age to young adult group. It may have changed with cellphones, but teenage girls used to buy the most records, boys the most theater tickets. That explains at least some of it. They don't want to mix this demographic so the tastes in culture of the teenage crowd dictate a lot of what is produced.

"Diversity demands more dark skinned, low IQ, savages be raised to positions of authority to pay back all the oppression they have endured by whitey.

Payback is a discivic bitch."

Order won't be restored until a subway accident brings about an automatic death sentance for the head of maintenance and/or the head of engineering and/or head of finance, as soon as it's determined which of those factors were responsible for the wrongful death.

After a couple dindus are summarily executed for being a screw up, few will want he job.

The flip side... since responsibility without authority is nothing more than scapegoating, the heads of engineering and maintenance each get to have absolute control over their subordinate personnel with regards to promotions, demotions, hiring, firings, and assigned duties, either themselves, or acting through the judgment of their subordinates.

"Similar dad, opposite results, oddly enough. We need all those hard-working immigrants to keep things going. He simply can't talk about immigrants without using the word hard-working. I don't believe he knows the words illegal or refugee, never heard him utter them."

Ask him why are there more immigrants in federal prison for crimes of violence than native born citizens. Micheal Savage (Jewish convert to Christianity) has mentioned this on more than one occasion.

"It takes a fairly small number of high IQ people in charge of average IQ people "

Doing this is now considered nazi racism in the USA.

Diversity demands more dark skinned, low IQ, savages be raised to positions of authority to pay back all the oppression they have endured by whitey.

Payback is a discivic bitch.

@8 Patrick KellyThe sooner the average virtue-signaling corporate dumbass realizes that women 'n minorities do NOT make good leaders and jettisons their equalist religion the better for society.

Unfortunately, with the #MeToo b.s. going on, the problem of idiot employers hiring and promoting women at the expense of men is likely to get worse, not better.

That's one factor, I suspect, in why nonwhite countries like Thailand are getting better infrastructure than we are: no virtue-signaling and no quota-hiring. We see that also with U.S.-made Japanese and Korean brands being significantly higher quality than American brands: the East Asians have no compunction against hiring poor white males in the Upland South to build their vehicles.

Monkeys roam free in India just like the cows. They did a test on monkey IQ and found that urban monkeys were smarter than rural monkeys. Apparently environment. Historically the same was true of urban and rural Americans.

They tested educational accomplishment (a common IQ proxy) of those kids that attended the Head Start program. Turned out they did better in school than the non Head Start group. Only it didn't last. After a couple of years it all evened out. I suspect that is true of adults in general. A good education will produce an apparently smarter person, but lacking ongoing stimulation, over time they regress to their mean.

Unknown wrote:Bangkok Thailand has significantly better infrastructure than New York - yet NYC is a much higher IQ city.

In addition to what kurt9 has pointed out, I would note that this is incorrect. Bangkok's BTS (skytrain) is very nice, but everything else about the city's infrastructure sucks. Traffic is a nightmare, the narrow, shabby sidewalks are virtually impassable, and large numbers of people commute to work on smelly, dangerous canal boats! And I'm not getting into the power lines that drape down to head level from the awful utility poles that line the streets downtown.

@ 2>>It takes a fairly small number of high IQ people in charge of average IQ people to maintain a very high level of infrastructure.

Let's examine the case of Brazil. Brazil has a large population, over 200 million. A significant percentage are of pure European background and we can presume that this portion of the population scores as Europeans do on IQ tests. Furthermore, compared to ourselves, not as many of the best and brightest of Brazil are siphoned off into economically destructive, rent-seeking rackets as lawyering, banking, media, etc........Yet, Brazil's infrastructure is very poor. There is not a single city in Brazil where it is safe to drink the water from the tap. Waste is often untreated and simply dumped into whatever watercourse passes through a city. Highways connecting all but the 3 largest cities are usually 2 lanes. Brazil has never had an extensive rail network, neither commuter nor national in scope, neither freight nor passenger. Yeah there are a few rail lines, but very few. Brazil has few industries that can compete with the US/Europe let alone the asians. In short, Brazil is 2nd world, right where we are headed....And, just consider the case of India. Do I need to elaborate?

To thrive, an entire nation must be healthy and robust. Sound of mind, spirit, body. It cannot depend on a special intellectual elite. We have gotten ourselves into a jam that will take centuries to reverse, if ever things can be reversed.

I'm no doubt kind of a buzzkill here, but I find Idiocracy to be one of the most morally reprensible things ever put to film. Every time I have tried to mention the problem of dropping IQs, it is literally impossible for people to keep this movie or the relevant quotes out of it. I get it, it's funny, but good Lord. One of the most concerning trends occurring in the West is literally a joke to most of the population because of that stupid flick.

"Just based on this, it's entirely possible that this is pure sampling error, i.e. it might not be the nation's IQ falling, but the IQ of young men entering the military. Many countries with "compulsory" military duty have plentiful ways to evade it, higher education often being one of them. I know nothing about Norway's military duty regulations, so perhaps somebody can fill it in?"

The Scandinavians have universal conscription for men (Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns, all of them). Going to college can get you a deferment, but not an out. It just puts you into OCS rather than enlisted basic training.These countries have a very small active duty military -- most serve just long enough to get their basic training and learn their MOS, and then a short stint with an active duty unit to get an idea of how units run when on active duty. Then they spend several decades as reservists. This allows them to have a reasonably-sized military, while keeping their active duty component very small. The Swiss, of course, have it optimized, but the Scandis aren't far behind.

Before WW2, every Polish male who attended a university was REQUIRED to be in their equivalent to ROTC. So, when the Soviets pulled their massacre at the Katyn forest, they literally wiped out nearly every single college-educated male in Poland.

"It takes a fairly small number of high IQ people in charge of average IQ people "

The problem with thinking this is a cure for low IQ in a population, is that the less able do not automatically put the more able in charge. Plus for the general good, the more able have to sacrifice their maximum benefit for the majority. What is far more likely in politics is that they form a clique that rules in its own self interest.

One has to wonder what the point of educating women is supposed to be when the next generation of women are going to be considerably less intelligent because so few of the highly intelligent, highly educated manage to replace themselves.

I found a couple graphs in Twitter that heavily implied sexual dimorphism of IQ has been increasing at an accelerating rate since the 1960s. Would need to find those again.

"It seems like more than 7 points. I was watching an introductory programming course at MIT filmed in 1986. By the second week of the course they were hitting topics like recursion and first order functions that most would consider advanced now. The students, nearly all white with a few Asians, didn't grow up with computers, and at most had used something like a Commodore 64 as a teen, but they were nodding along like they were getting it. I found myself thinking, "Were we really that smart back then?""

Realize that MIT probably went through topics faster than any other college in the country.

When I was in Iraq, I came up with an idea to solve a technical problem. Having no study materials, I went to the MIT Open Courseware, and downloaded everything I could.

I compared MIT's courses to what I took at Purdue.

In programming, they went significantly faster than the courses I took at Purdue (and all of mine were Computer Engineering track). The "electronics circuits" class proceeded at the same pace as the one I took, but the examples and homework problems were about 50% more complicated.

I don't know if I could keep up if I had gone to MIT -- a few of my classmates, I absolutely know that they would not have been able to do so.

The only other school I expect would be equivalent to MIT's speed or depth of teaching a subject would be California Institute of Technology. Berkeley is somewhere in between MIT and Purdue. Other Big 10(14? or whatever the number is this year) Conference schools seem to be roughly the same as Purdue, although U of Illinois is rated slightly ahead of Purdue. My impression from looking at their courses that are available for independent, non-credited study is that U of IL is rated higher because they just demand slightly higher test scores to get in, but the material taught did not seem to differ in any substantial way from the courses I took at Purdue.

Oh, and while talking about the hard-working immigrants, he also can't disparage fast enough those born here who aren't working as hard despite having had advantages as opposed to all those challenges facing those poor, poor immigrants who nevertheless work so hard.

I have to hear this sort of "aren't I cleverly cynical about my own race" anti-white horseshit from my brother and mom ("Our economy would collapse without illegals! Tomatoes would be $5 a piece! Hurhurhur!"). Of course, he's not moving to south Chicago live amongst the noble darkies, sharing his valuable privilege, and is hatefully denying his sons the great enrichment opportunities of being the only white kids in a inner city school. SWPLs,amirite?

Bangkok Thailand has significantly better infrastructure than New York - yet NYC is a much higher IQ city.

Perhaps, but how's the infrastructure in the rest of Thailand? A lot of foreigners (and their money) in Bangkok.

Is New York really a high IQ city, or is there a Brazilian stratification of IQ there? I mean, how many Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs are there in the metro city limits?

@51 Average IQ in Brazil is about 88, which is terrible. Most of the Europeans are actually mestizos of no great intelligence...The smartest groups in Brazil are the Japanese (less than 1% of the population but 30% of University students), and the pure whites and high whites in the 3 Southern states, all of whom have secession movements..

We're already in trouble on infrastructure in America. Everybody knows it, this is a constant feature of national elections now. The fabled "Infrastructure Investment Fund."

Back in March 1911, an errant blowtorch ignited a fire that burned down Boundary Field, the home of the Washington Senators baseball team. By June, the new all-concrete Griffith Stadium was constructed and unveiled.. And all on the owner's dime. That stadium stood and served until the Senators left town 49 years later in 1960.

Today it would take that long just to get the paperwork filed, the task apparently cannot be financed without the taxpayers because it costs a billion, it takes two years or so to build, and the teams will be moving to build a new one within 20 years.

Elsewhere in DC, the public transit rail system has been embroiled in running scandals for several YEARS now because of maintenance catastrophes that include loss of life. There is no end in sight. Rails, bridges, tunnels, escalators, train cars, engines, you name it. Serious problems exist across the board in every category. Engineers have found serious structural problems in the NEW concrete just poured for the latest rail-line expansion before it even opened. Seriously, there is no end in sight for all the coming problems, not that they can fix the current ones.

Commuter flow by rail from New Jersey to Manhattan is something you don't talk to New York officials about. They don't want to hear it. They are praying the tubes keep lasting. The salt erosion from Superstorm Sandy has them in a real jam, and they are relying in places on ancient cables that are amazing, but ancient, and absolutely nobody on the planet builds anymore.

My God have you seen what they are doing in California with this high-speed rail fiasco?

We already don't know what we are doing on infrastructure in America. We're already struggling to keep plates in the air here.

This stuff is pretty terminal, because it can't be discussed in political circles at all...I did a rough analysis of the decline in SAT scores over the last 50 years, and found that it corresponded to roughly 2 IQ points per decade, which is 5 points per generation...This is important because the SAT is taken by the smartest of the college bound HS students, and is only required at top schools...I couldn't get anyone interested, though I had no problem proving critics wrong, including Greg Cochran.

Much of the international comparisons cited in prior comments appear to ignore the commonwealth vs clannish bimodality of peoples.

It doesn't matter how smart are your people. If they're clannish to the bone, they'll hire their entire family (no matter how many are imbeciles) or tribe before looking to quality. Another example is immaculate apartments amidst sanitary landfill city conditions.

Many Americans take for granted the "fair play" rules by which our mostly Anglo-Saxon forbears ran things. The Irish brought clannishness in politics and city services, the Southern Italians brought clannishness to organized crime, and blacks simply reify African social norms wherever their DNA predominates.

Look at Detroit: the black majority could not maintain the infrastructure and the whites who used to do it mostly left, so they imported Arabs and Indians to do it (see, e.g. water supply infrastructure), but they couldn't do it either. To the extent it is maintained today, it is white "consultants" who come in periodically to fix everything the Indians and Arabs can't. At least they are smart enough to keep the blacks away from the machinery most of the time. Brawndo really isn't a substitute for machine lubricants or hydraulic fluid.

I suspect the give-a-shit quotient is proportional to Christian religiosity. And the younger generations especially are filled with agnostics and atheists.

True. The ones I see online who are clued-in on diversity and moving right politically are still utterly atheist and assume every other thinking person is too. Maybe that will change as they get older because some things tend to go together. But for now they see religious people as being in the same category of charlatans as feminists and other peddlers of fables.

"I get it, it's funny, but good Lord. One of the most concerning trends occurring in the West is literally a joke to most of the population because of that stupid flick."

Mike Judge made Idiocracy as a warning.But, the MPIAs took it as a joke. You know, the same types who used to go around, thinking it was COOL to imitate Beavis and Butthead, because they were too clueless to realize that B&B were meant to be examples of who/what NOT to be and how NOT to behave.

Want a real shock?

I'm reading the MAD Magazine DVD with every issue from #1 (Oct-Nov 1952) to #460 (Dec 2005) as a separate PDF file(*). Currently on issue #45, March 1959.

(*) A major step up from the 1998 digital archive with proprietary data format, and a slow, clumsy, and UNFUNNY interface.

It's surprising what mild things were portrayed as a MAJOR screw-up, something only an idiot would do.

This issue has a piece near the front, written as a collaboration pieces with representatives of various colleges and universities across the nation, and played totally straight, "The WORST of 1958", with a description for why each awardee won that category.

The Panel of Judges is from one student from each of these student newspapersVassar IgiturNorthwestern PROFILEMichigan State SPARTANPenn State FROTHM.I.T. VOO DOOFordham THORNColumbia JESTERU of Alabama RAMMER JAMMERStanford CHAPARRALU of California PELICANU of Iowa GREEN GANDERGeorgia Tech REMBLER

Here is a sample from their 12 awards and comments by the student newspaper staff writers.

"WORST" BOOKOn the Road"Jack Kerouac's book was a sick example of how the other half (the half-baked half) lives. It became the bible of the 'Beat Generation,' a group of idiots who stay up all night listening to jazz records and poetry. As these cats never get any sleep, you can guess why they're 'beat.'"

"WORST" REGULAR TV SHOWThe Price is Right.Noth the thirst for "knowledge," but the thirst for "things" was the main theme of this TV show which never even tried to hide its appeal to America's worship of the materialistic. Questions used on this program had to be authenticated by the National Association of Manufacturers.

"WORST" NEW PRODUCTStripe ToothpasteStripe Toothpaste marks a great step forward in America's march of prgress. Although stripes on toothpaste may not contribute much towards cleaner teeth, such innovations do pave the way for other significant products like checkerboard halvah, poka-dot pizzas, and mainly green profits.

"WORST" DESIGNED CARThe EdselThe Edsel, Ford Motor Company's new addition to its line, made its bow in 1958, and promptly fell on its face. Descriptions of the radical new departure in front-end designs varied from: "And Oldsmobile sucking a lemon" to many more colorful, in fact too colorful, to put into print.

"WORST" NATIONAL FADHula HoopsThe Hula Hoop fad was accepted by millions of American parents, the very same people who were so shocked, and who shrieked and screamed objections to the sexy gyrations of Elvis Presley. Now they smiled proudly as the kids spun hoops with contortions far worse than Elvis ever performed. [drawing is of a high school girl in a skirt, with a bunch of older guys standing around gawking. I think they would have written "...as their daughters..." but there doesn't appear there's enough room, so changed to "the kids".

And of course (typical for MAD)

"WORST" MAGAZINEMAD Magazine [shown hanging in an outhouse with the pages' bottom halves all torn off, implied that it's being used for toilet paper]The voting on this category was almost unanimous, which clearly indicates that these awards are just in the spirit of good fun. Why, it's so obvious that MAD isn't really the worst magazine of the year, all you have to do is look at the newsstand and ... if you think about it ... hmmmm!

Today's current MIT students likely couldn't keep up with the MIT of 3 decades ago. MIT no longer uses Scheme as the language for their introductory programming course. They use Python; Scheme proved to be too difficult for the young 'uns.

I have "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" on my desk, as I type. Fascinating book. Anybody who is interested in programming should get this book (it's available for free, just Google, but it's better to have a printed reference), install Scheme (Racket is a good installation. Just google. Can use LISP or Clojure too) and work away. A few months working with Scheme/LISP/Clojure and one will recoil at having ever to use any of the procedural/OO languages again.

If, as someone noted above, the IQ decline began even before the Victorian age,then what was the point of inflection; conversely, when was the point of inflection for a rise in IQ: can that question even be asked; for how would we measure it?

The Victorian age saw the rise of the industrial age and the rise and emplacement of materialism.

In the late 19th century, the elites made public school mandatory; members of the Greatest Generation could drop out at 8th grade and still have a decent future; the Boomer Generation was the first generation which entirely finished public education; the progressives' control of public, even private, education was complete by 1973; thereafter, progressive ideology had tight control of children and their "education" from day care through high school; even college.

In both instances, the existence of God increasingly was denied and the public practice and display of the faith was increasingly restricted: I am convinced, as St Paul declares in Romans chapter One, the denial of the existence God produces a reprobate mind;therefore a loss of intellect.

"Look at Detroit: the black majority could not maintain the infrastructure and the whites who used to do it mostly left, so they imported Arabs and Indians to do it (see, e.g. water supply infrastructure), but they couldn't do it either."

Even dumber. Detroit REFUSES to hire enough competent whites. Every city project, BY LAW must be 50% + 1 Detroit residents AT EVERY LEVEL of the labor and supervision. That means a contractor can't put the white guys on the more intellectually demanding tasks while putting the blacks on the less demanding tasks.

So, Detroit continues to get worse, becuase Detroiters would rather ruin their own city (which they didn't build... "Coleman Young GAVE THIS TO US" -- no mention of who Coleman Young got it from) than they would have it fixed properly by whites who know what they are doing. And they *-rig everything.

When I first saw Idiocracy I thought "How did they get away with this?" Because despite the fact that the movie didn't really go anywhere with it, the premise was brilliant and highly destructive to the Blank Slate Narrative. Maybe fatally destructive.

Then I realized they didn't get away with it, because it didn't get a theatrical release.

The smartest groups in Brazil are the Japanese (less than 1% of the population but 30% of University students), and the pure whites and high whites in the 3 Southern states, all of whom have secession movements..

@59 pyrrhusGermans are also heavily overrepresented among Brazil's elite. Italians too to a lesser extent.

When we break the connection between ourselves and God; who is the organizing and creative principle or the cosmos and ourselves; we should expect a diminution of our faculties.I think you have the right of it.

@72- The turn of the 20th century saw a revolution greater than the industrial, not talked about nearly as much as it ought to be: the petro/electrical revolution. Industrialization brought a demographic upheaval with it, but the power of electricity and the internal combustion is what for the first time in human history really raised the standard of living of the lowly and kept them up reliably.

Comfort breeds weakness.

Plus, there were of course the World Wars. And much remark has been made upon the flower of Europe's manly youth perishing at the Somme and elsewhere. I suppose we'll never really know how much was lost in their blood.

Mr. Deficient wrote:Why is that? I am a bit of a mid whit that keeps trying to get into programming and almost everyone puts forth python as an exemplary language (then again MPAI).

If what you mean is that you would like to be employed, do what you can to find out what sorts of programmers are in demand. Maybe look at the help wanted stuff, talk to people in the field, educators, etc. Some languages are more difficult than others. You may have to find your skill level.

According to the libertardians, especially the ones at the Economic Policy Journal, race, IQ, and culture simply don't matter. We will have this wonderful libertardian utopia where all those shitskins will understand concepts like NAP and PPS and act accordingly.

Thanks to the dumbing down of society and women voting for more communism each and ever time, I would guess a North American Brazil would be one of the better outcomes.

Modern societies have produced a circumstance were what counts is the number of babies. And as the normal sexual tendencies acted out produce children, one has to plan to not reproduce at the biological limit. Thus people who plan are selected against and we should expect an expanding population of non planners.

Why is that? I am a bit of a mid whit that keeps trying to get into programming and almost everyone puts forth python as an exemplary language (then again MPAI).

I learned Python mostly for fun. I used to prgram in C and C++ long ago. I took a then free Python class through Coursera. It is called a 'glue' language by some as it ties together many libraries and concepts, if you want it to. It is easy to get into but can get very powerful if you want. E.g. import numpy and you have numerical methods, panda for data analysis, etc. I like Python.

At an academic meeting with a social media policy. Have not thought than warning people not to tweet preliminary and unpublished results means the have told any SJW in the room how to ruin the productive minorities career. Another data point in the decline

"Why is that? I am a bit of a mid whit that keeps trying to get into programming and almost everyone puts forth python as an exemplary language (then again MPAI)."

Python is the new B.A.S.I.C. for the 2010's.

It's good for whipping up a demo, or where you might have some data structures (like hash tables) that can be a pain to code with more capable languages that have pointers (like C or C++) but which doesn't have long run-times, so you don't care if it uses 10x to 100x more CPU cycles than the same program in C... because your primary concern is that it can be up and running very quickly (less than a day) AND that you should be able to have the whole thing debugged by the end of the day.

Python is good for learning some programming principles.

On the other hand, it has some built-in facilities that are deceiving -- one line of code that can take 2 seconds of CPU time to execute. Especially if you aren't aware of the performance characteristics of the (partialy hidden) data-structure that's being manipulated.

I would NEVER write a major application in Python.

C++ for a lot of things. Lisp.Java for somewhat smaller. C for things where I want to work close to the hardware (microcontrollers) but don't feel like programming in assembly.

I don't know PHP, so I can't speak to that.JavaScript is the worst language I've ever seen. I would rather program in "brainfuck" than in JavaScript.

"When I first saw Idiocracy I thought "How did they get away with this?" Because despite the fact that the movie didn't really go anywhere with it, the premise was brilliant and highly destructive to the Blank Slate Narrative. Maybe fatally destructive.

Then I realized they didn't get away with it, because it didn't get a theatrical release. "

But they did, and I can prove it.

How many adults do you know who have NOT seen Idiocracy?

The cultural penetration is near total, even without getting released in theaters.

IdocracyHow many people you know that have seen it depends on the crowd you run with.

Over at Box Office Mojo:

IdiocracyTotal Lifetime GrossesDomestic: $444,093 89.7%+ Foreign: $51,210 10.3%= Worldwide: $495,303 Less than .5M. Didn't open in a lot of theaters and they pulled it quickly. As Vox says, you got to own the distribution network.

Meanwhile Stalone's movie 'Creed II' Punches Up $55M Debut in the recent five day thanksgiving weekend. Avengers: Infinity war is now over two billion world wide.

My take on a poor country that has a really nice capital city is that the leadership is spending money on its own living space. Plus if there are no seedy places then the the city is not a welfare haven and enforces stuff like zoning laws that keep the lower income folk away.

Not the worst way to run a country but not a great accomplishment either.

C++ for a lot of things. Lisp.Java for somewhat smaller. C for things where I want to work close to the hardware (microcontrollers) but don't feel like programming in assembly.

I've been moving a fortran financial prog to excel vba (they wanted the spreadsheet port) for a while and getting ready to give it a permanent home in a windows application. Was planning on C# with the new application formatting. Is this sound?

Been running through MVVM structures and organization in preparation for it.

It's been 10 years since I've worked in managed C, so I'm hoping this will be a good thing.

Python is a very nice first computer language. And in several ways it's becoming a de facto standard in several numerical and data analysis areas. That's not because it is particularly fast (it isn't), but because of its easy integration with numerical libraries and increasingly important things such as OpenCV, Tensorflow and Keras to name a few.

In truth the vast majority of number crunching that we do at my lab anymore has been tossed over to the GPUs, the graphics cards. Even when working with the faster compiled languages such as C, we are always looking to offload work away from its core strength (CPU speed) and toss it to the GPU or calling highly optimized C/C++ libraries that parallelize and offload computations under the hood anyway -- precisely as the Python code would do, really. It's increasingly rare to hand code an algorithm anymore entirely in C/C++, rather we construct it using optimized primitives supplied by professionally tuned libraries.

I read research that suggested that the average IQ of the society that you live in was of far greater importance than your own personal IQ. I believe this. One guy with a 130 IQ goes to a country with an average IQ of 80 --- he is not going to change the standard of living.

So, if that is true, we need to consider how to raise the average IQ of our country. I suggest we break it apart and let the whites have a homeland.

Where? Which part of the US? That is the question.

Of course, I would prefer to remove all non-whites from the USA and then work on raising the IQ of those who are left.

"I've been moving a fortran financial prog to excel vba (they wanted the spreadsheet port) for a while and getting ready to give it a permanent home in a windows application. Was planning on C# with the new application formatting. Is this sound?"

I would use a language which isn't tied to just one company's platforms.

If you write it in Java instead, you can even port it to a $35 Raspberry Pi consuming only 12.5 Watts of power (less if you network it with ethernet rather than wifi), and taking up no more space than a deck of cards, and a 5V, 2.5Amp "wall wart" power supply. A combination fan/PoE (power over ethernet) hat is now available, and the combination still fits in nearly all existing cases).

ALWAYS plan for the future -- even if you don't know what the future is, if two options are equally difficult or easy, take the one which closes the fewest doors or burns the fewest bridges in the future.

"And right on cue the BBC reports today that facebook has a black people problem. And the solution? You guessed it: more black people.

What could possibly go wrong?"

From the article, first paragraph below the sub-head:

"Mark Luckie, a black, former Facebook employee whose job it was to handle the firm’s relationship with “influencers”,"

*ANYBODY* who describes himself (or usually herself) is someone who produces nothing but spending all day on some social app or another, when not begging profitable companies to give the "influencer" free shit. Like the 20-ish woman a few years ago who demanded a hotel suite free-of-charge "because I'm an influencer."

After her opening beg, the conversation went something like this (via twitter! LOL).

Hotelier: Pay up like everyone else, or don't come here!

Influencer: But I can get you more customers!

Hotelier: Can you guarantee me 50 more reservations?

Influencer: No

Hotelier: Well then, it's not worth it to me to give you a few thousand $$$ worth of freebies if you can't show me how I'll make up that money in some other way.

My visit to South Africa in 2013 during the reign of Kenyon only brought me to the conclusion that America is not First World on the whole. I didn't see much of SA but what I seen was comparable to 'Murka, and frankly since I am very perceptive I could tell the Afrikaners think the usual "Murkan contard who shows up to hunt is a bit of a joke.

I wouldn't be too fast to dismiss Java over the licensing fee changes. They need to be looked at case-by-case to see how they affect you. As I understood it, the fees are intended to be a 'cattle prod' to keep vendors either moving with the latest Java release or paying to help maintain older release. The current release licenses will stay the same as they are now. All this is to fight the horrible security problems the Java world has seen, a big chunk of them related to the tons of projects out there still using very old JREs. I view this licensing change as born out of a protective desire for Java more than anything else.

I like Java, but, to the guy porting FORTRAN code to Java, beware. Java has an issue of concern to any numeric application, namely Java is designed to behave exactly the same across all platforms by default. As an upshot to that decision, Java has an odd implementation of the IEEE floating point representations. By default, Java is pretty much always doing floating point calculations to 64-bit precision. That is okay for the VAST MAJORITY of applications, but for old numeric FORTRAN code that's doing high-precision floating point iterations, LOOK OUT. Many computers internally do these calculation to 80-bit precision even though results are stored in 64-bit results (this is to reduce error accumulation that iteratively builds up). Java by default does not do this. You have to look into the "stdfp" modes of Java to change this, so, again, BEWARE of Java on any numeric application. Default behavior may lead you to different results from that FORTRAN code. Check results carefully.

If you are indeed stuck with having to integrate things into Excel from FORTRAN (which sound very odd to me, I must say!) the most natural choice seems to be a Microsoft .NET language, either C# or VisualBasic.NET.

Perl or Python still won't need to be looked at. Even minor barriers can have an affect at the margin.

True, the situation is not ideal, but the world is indeed stranger that we can imagine. My field we work with 16-bit imagery every day. If there is one thing for which Java would be a horrible fit, it's 16-bit imagery. First, dealing with imagery at all in Java is a bad experience. Currently Java has three classes named 'Image', all of which are incompatible, none of which does everything you need, and all of which support a tiny set of image formats. Plus, Java has no concept of an 'unsigned short' at all, and this is the storage format of 10-to-16 bit imagery. So you're constantly doing a bunch of bit-fiddling all the time. To top it off, my field is numerically intensive, and Java has the known problem of floating point odd-duck-ness.

But, because the world is stranger than anybody can imagine, the most successful client-side application written in Java is apparently ImageJ by the NIH, and it is dedicated of course to analyzing 16-bit imagery. It's an industry standard in any industry where you analyze such imagery. I wrote plug-ins for it over 20 years ago that are still in use every day at my lab, and I haven't had to recompile them in about 20 years. New machines, new OSes, new environments, new JREs, doesn't seem to matter.

To me that's astonishing. Other software I've written in Python and C/C++ (this is where I do most of my stuff) needs to be constantly re-compiled anytime anything changes. The change from Python2 to Python3 was extremely frustrating, it broke everything. The proliferation of Python environments has gotten totally out of hand -- on this machine I'm typing on I have at least -- at least -- 16 versions of Python2 and Python3 simultaneously in various configurations of virtualenv, Anancoda, system Python, Python for MSYS (32 and 64 bit versions, each for Python2 and Python3), Python with Visual Studio (32 and 64 bit versions), Python for Intel System Studio (32 and 64 bit versions), Python for the Tensorflow installation (each version), Python for CNTK, etc. Man it is turning into a Wild West on the Python side. Still, I use it every day and I like it. I haven't programmed in Java seriously for a very long time.

It's a pain in the butt to support any language. There's always costs. It took me a long time to forgive Guido for breaking everything with Python3. I don't see the new Java licensing change as anything near as radical as that one. We're still going to be stuck with ImageJ and Java. And that's not so bad in the scheme of things.

Crew wrote:Or Ada, especially if you're using the Gnoga library. (Plus there's the SPARK subset/provers if you need high-reliability and/or provability.)The number of people who use Ada, outside of MIC companies, is tiny.Good luck with maintenance.It's gaining ground in high-reliability fields, and the new Ada 2020 standard is shaping up to be pretty cool (adding a PARALLEL keyword for ultralightweight threading + lock-free containers).

But given how easy it is to interface with another language, for example importing from COBOL is as easy as:Function Calculate( Input : Integer; Rate : Percent ) return Amount with Convention => COBOL, Import;(Obviously with Percent and Amount being the proper data-type.)it's really quite well-suited to being the backbone of your application, enabling you to not have to throw everything out in a rewrite; you could for example keep the batch-handling of COBOL in COBOL, or the numeric handling in FORTRAN, or whatnot and use Ada to ensure good data goes to them. For example, for one of the VA's medical programs you could say:-- SSN format: ###-##-####Subtype Social_Security_Number is String(1..11) with Dynamic_Predicate => (for all Index in Social_Security_Number'Range => (case Index is when 4|7 => Social_Security_Number(Index) = '-', when others => Social_Security_Number(Index) in '0'..'9' ) );and let the type-system catch all the malformatted entries. (This technique is really nice for maintaining DB consistency; especially if you're forbidden from using triggers and/or foreign-keys.)

But all of that pales compared to the fact that Ada isn't hard to learn; I have contacts that go from new-hires having zero experience to productive in three-months, and that's about the time it would take for someone with Ada experience to get up-to-speed on those [MASSIVE] codebases.

Crew wrote:All I can say is: Ada is starting to look like COBOL.It's always been about keywords over symbols, readability over writability -- it looks a lot better with indenting and syntax highlighting... also, it cleans up a lot of implementation code to have predicates/restrictions on the type. A more concise example would be null-excluding pointers, given a Window root-type:Type Handle is not null access Window'Class;

Ada isn't hard to learn or to write. Unfortunately, it's impossible to compile. It's the first compiler built with open contempt for its users. My Ada compiler would tell me, "What are you doing? Stop that!" Then simply, "No." Then it began to send me anonymous emails, I'm pretty sure, saying, "DIE!" I think it began to stalk me.

Face it, Ada's named after a woman and she hates nerds. Wow is Ada picky.

@140 -- LOLI actually like the strict compiler. One of the reasons there's no "Lint for Ada" is that virtually everything a linter would do is mandated by the standard [and hence implemented in every compiler].

There's also a good chunk of static-analysis that's mandated -- this was beyond-bleeding-edge when Ada was designed -- and that's one of the reasons the early compilers were so expensive (and slow)... but nowadays, compiler technology has caught-up and Ada compilation times aren't too bad (IIRC C++ is worse, if there's templates).

I hear Haskell is similarly picky, but haven't yet picked up that language.

Among the Millennial Generation Idiocracy is already here, and in full swing. The "Welcome to Costco, I love you" guy is actually significantly smarter than a shocking number of Millennial customer service employees I have had dealings with.

Every generation before the Millennials easily learned the business rule of not insulting your customers when they don't like your product. With movies like GRRRRL Power Ghostbusters, Star Wars Ass: The Last Jedi, and with games such as various failures including the recent Diablo Immortal huge fail. No, the Millenials call you various ists and phobes for daring to not love their crap sandwich offering. Star Wars shows that even it is not too big to fail by insulting unsatisfied customers.

There are some very smart Millennials, but pound for pound it is the dumbest generation by far. When you catch someone online using "should of" you have just spotted a Millennial.

Query: In my experience Miami, FL has a good infrastructure that works quite well. The city is LOADED with minorities. What gives? Maybe they are still enjoying the benefits of skimming off Cuba's top social tier in the 1960s?

My theory is that over the generations our IQ will decline and this is based upon the premise that the influence of sin in the world has increased in strength since the time of Adam and Eve. So given that the degeneracy of humanity has increased over time it is only natural the IQ scores will drop as a consequence.

One of my primary bits of evidence on this is Christians general attitude towards a 400 year old book, the King Jame Bible. One of their excuses for preferring the modern versions over the KJV is that the KJV is hard to read! And yet this book was written for the common man 400 years ago. So either our collective intelligence has declined over the years or the common man back in those days was very smart compared to today.

How do you distinguish between "IQ is dropping" and "more of the mediocre brains are taking the test"? Increased college enrollment would predict a drop in entrance scores even with identical populations.

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